Browsing Harvard Kennedy School by Author "Zeckhauser, Richard"

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    • Addressing Catastrophic Risks: Disparate Anatomies Require Tailored Therapies 

      Viscusi, Kip W.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
      Catastrophic risks differ in terms of their natural or human origins, their possible amplification by human behaviors, and the relationships between those who create the risks and those who suffer the losses. Given their ...

    • Assessing Uncertainty in Intelligence 

      Friedman, Jeffrey Allan; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2012)
      This article addresses the challenge of managing uncertainty when producing estimative intelligence. Much of the theory and practice of estimative intelligence aims to eliminate or reduce uncertainty, but this is often ...

    • Audits as Signals 

      Kotowski, Maciej Henryk; Weisbach, David A.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (University of Chicago Law Review, 2014)
      A broad array of law enforcement strategies, from income tax to bank regulation, involve self-reporting by regulated agents and auditing of some fraction of the reports by the regulating bureau. Standard models of ...

    • The Behavior of Savings and Asset Prices When Preferences and Beliefs are Heterogeneous 

      Tran, Ngoc-Khanh; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
      Movements in asset prices are a major risk confronting individuals. This paper establishes new asset pricing results when agents differ in risk preference, time preference and/or expectations. It shows that risk tolerance ...

    • Betrayal Aversion: Evidence from Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States 

      Bohnet, Iris; Greig, Fiona; Herrmann, Benedikt; Zeckhauser, Richard (American Economic Association, 2008-02)
      Due to betrayal aversion, people take risks less willingly when the agent of uncertainty is another person rather than nature. Individuals in six countries (Brazil, China, Oman, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United States) ...

    • The CAPS Prediction System and Stock Market Returns 

      Avery, Christopher N.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (2009)
      We analyze the informational content of more than 1.2 million stock picks provided by more than 60,000 individuals from November 1, 2006 to October 31, 2007 on the CAPS open access website created by the Motley Fool company ...

    • The "CAPS" Prediction System and Stock Market Returns 

      Avery, Christopher N.; Chevalier, Judith; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
      We study the predictive power of approximately 2.5 million stock picks submitted by individual users to the “CAPS” website run by the Motley Fool company (www.caps.fool.com). These picks prove to be surprisingly informative ...

    • Causes of the Financial Crisis: Many Responsible Parties 

      Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University., 2010)
      This analysis argues that blame for the financial crisis falls specifically and heavily on a broad range of the private players and public regulators in our financial sector. Wall Street and the government joined hands in ...

    • Deterring and Compensating Oil Spill Catastrophes: The Need for Strict and Two-Tier Liablility 

      Kip, Viscusi, W.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2011)
      The BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill highlighted the glaring weakness in the current liability and regulatory regime for oil spills and for environmental catastrophes more broadly. This article proposes a new liability ...

    • Disgust Promotes Disposal: Souring the Status Quo 

      Han, Seunghee; Lerner, Jennifer S.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard Uinversiy, 2010)
      Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them. Is this phenomenon so deeply embedded that even incidental disgust – i.e., where the source of disgust is unrelated to a possessed object – triggers disposal? Two ...

    • The Disgust-Promotes-Disposal Effect 

      Han, Seunghee; Lerner, Jennifer S.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (Springer, 2012)
      Individuals tend toward status quo bias: preferring existing options over new ones. There is a countervailing phenomenon: Humans naturally dispose of objects that disgust them, such as foul-smelling food. But what if the ...

    • Dopamine and Risk Choices in Different Domains: Findings Among Series Tournament Bridge Players 

      Zeckhauser, Richard Jay; Rand, David Gertler; Wernerfelt, Nils Christian; Garcia, Justin; Lum, Koji; Dreber-Almenberg, Anna (2010)
      Individuals differ significantly in their willingness to take risks, partly due to genetic differences. We explore how risk taking behavior correlates with different versions of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4). We ...

    • Dopamine and Risk Choices in Different Domains: Findings Among Serious Tournament Bridge Players 

      Dreber-Almenberg, Anna; Rand, David Gertler; Wernerfelt, Nils Christian; Garcia, Justin R.; Lum, J. Koji; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
      Individuals differ significantly in their willingness to take risks, partly due to genetic differences. We explore how risk taking behavior correlates with different versions of the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4). We ...

    • The Dopamine Receptor D4 Gene (DRD4) and Self-Reported Risk Taking in the Economic Domain 

      Dreber, Anna; Rand, David Gertler; Wernerfelt, Nils Christian; Garcia, Justin; Lum, J. Koji; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School for Government, Harvard University, 2011)
      Background: Recent evidence suggests that individual variation in risk taking is partly due to genetic factors. Methodology/Principal Findings: We explore how self-reported risk taking in different domains correlates with ...

    • The Elasticity of Trust: How to Promote Trust in the Arab Middle East and the United States 

      Bohnet, Iris; Herrmann, Benedikt; Al-Ississ, Mohamad; Robbett, Andrea; Khalid, Al-Yahia; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
      To trust is to risk. When we lend someone money, we make ourselves vulnerable, hoping or expecting that the borrower will reward our trust and return the money at a later stage, possibly with interest or a reciprocal favor ...

    • Extreme Leaders As Negotiation Anchors 

      King, David; Schneer, Benjamin; Zeckhauser, Richard (Harvard Kennedy School, 2022-04)
      Legislative leaders tend to be ideologically more extreme than their median members. Why? This paper shows that party members select extreme leaders as a strategic measure to anchor negotiations. Anchoring succeeds because ...

    • Female Employment and Fertility in Rural China 

      Fang, Hai; Eggleston, Karen N.; Rizzo, John A.; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, 2010)
      Data on 2,288 married women from the 2006 China Health and Nutrition Survey are deployed to study how off-farm female employment affects fertility. Such employment reduces a married woman’s actual number of children by ...

    • Generic Script Share and the Price of Brand-Name Drugs: The Role of Consumer Choice 

      Rizzo, John; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (2012-01-26)
      Pharmaceutical expenditures have grown rapidly in recent decades, and now total nearly 10% of health care costs. Generic drug utilization has risen substantially alongside, from 19% of scripts in 1984 to 47% in 2001, thus ...

    • Getting an Honest Answer: Clickers in the Classroom 

      Levy, Dan; Yardley, Joshua Shawn; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (2016)
      Some preliminary experiments the authors conducted suggested that when instructors asked students to raise their hands to indicate support for a certain answer or position, the results they got were very different than ...

    • Health Insurance Exchanges — Making the Markets Work 

      Frank, Richard Gabriel; Zeckhauser, Richard Jay (Massachusetts Medical Society, 2009)
      Americans purchase health insurance in various ways. Some buy individual policies. For them, medical underwriting is common, and preexisting conditions can preclude, limit, or dramatically increase the cost of coverage. ...